Jury: Public Service Commission district lines don't favor political party

A Helena jury has concluded that Montana lawmakers’ primary purpose in redrawing the state’s current utility commission districts wasn’t to favor one political party over another.

Jurors in a Lewis and Clark County district court ruled 9-3 Friday in favor of the 2023 Legislature following a multi-day trial this week. The Legislature had been accused of gerrymandering Public Service Commission districts in a lawsuit brought by five individual voters and Montana Conservation Voters.

The Public Service Commission approves rates for monopoly utilities, including large electric and gas companies NorthWestern Energy and Montana Dakota Utilities. In that capacity, the PSC impacts household budgets of roughly 430,000 Montana utility customers. Those customers are legally recognized as “captive,” meaning they lack the free-market choice of shopping around for a better deal.

Defending the Legislature, attorney Thane Johnson argued that lawmakers had produced five districts that evenly split the state’s population, addressing the concerns of a 2022 federal court review of PSC districts.

The PSC map in use prior to 2022, which hadn’t been updated since 2003, was found by a panel of federal judges to violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that year. The panel ordered the state to use court-approved districts for 2022 commission elections.

Lawmakers responded to the federal ruling by producing five new PSC districts that varied in population by less than one percent during the 2023 session.

But the new districts, initially produced via a bill sponsored by Sen. Keith Regier, R-Kalispell, fractured each of Montana’s six largest communities into two or more districts. The result, plaintiffs in the current case argued, was that urban voters with common interests were split into multiple districts, fracturing their voting bloc. 

Broadly speaking, voters in Montana’s urban cores are more likely to vote Democratic than their rural counterparts. The plaintiffs argue that the resulting PSC districts disproportionately benefit one of the major political parties. Republicans currently hold all five utility commission seats.

The voter plaintiffs include former Gallatin County commissioner Donald Seifert and former Secretary of State Bob Brown, of Whitefish. Both Seifert and Brown served as Republicans. Joseph Lafromboise, of Hill County; Nancy Hamilton, of Valley County; Simon Harris, of Yellowstone County and Montana Conservation Voters are the other plaintiffs in the case.

Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen is the named defendant as the state’s top election official. 

Friday’s verdict concerned specifically whether the Legislature’s primary purpose in drawing the new districts was to create districts that favor one political party over another. 

By Jan. 4, attorneys in the case will submit arguments on whether the districts violate voter protections in the U.S. Constitution.

Key to the voters’ case in this week’s trial was district analysis by Stephanie Somersille, a mathematician who through a computer analysis, produced hundreds of thousands of PSC district maps based on state guidelines for creating districts that didn’t skew election outcomes. 

Somersille told jurors Wednesday that she couldn’t produce a map like the one produced by the Legislature. While Montana Democrats have won 40% or more of the vote in recent statewide elections, her analysis concluded that the party’s chance of winning any of the five PSC districts drawn by the Legislature was zero. 

“I found with typical voting patterns the map would have awarded zero seats to Democrats,” Somersille said. 

Most state government and federal political districts in Montana are redrawn every 10 years to account for population changes identified by the U.S. Census. Districts for state House and Senate seats, as well as U.S. House districts are crafted by a bipartisan, five-member commission.

Public Service Commission districts are treated differently in that they’re reapportioned by the Legislature at lawmakers’ discretion.

Tom Lutey is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a Helena-based nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at tlutey@montanafreepress.org.